The Pines (14 page)

“Oh yes. I have fine qualities.”

Pamela faltered, confused by the bitterness of the brief laugh. “I mean, it just don’t seem right that you”—she gulped coffee and blushed—“that you…you…” Her voice became a pleading whine. “You know, I was thinking to night, Lonny and Wallace was so different, for brothers, I mean. I mean, Lonny’s so dark, not like Wallace was. I guess there must really be some Indian blood in the family, like they say. And Lonny’s got them eyes.”

Athena took a deep breath, deciding she might as well make conversation. “Have you had a letter from Lonny recently?”

“Not in a long time.” Pam relaxed into the subject. “I told you, the last one said that guy who was writin’ them for him was gettin’ out. I sure miss him. Those eyes.” She gave a small, dramatic shiver. “The way he looks at me sometimes—sort of like an animal.”

The other woman stirred her coffee…around and around…and concentrated on the rattle of the spoon in the cup. It embarrassed her to hear Pamela talk this way. She knew Lonny Monroe neglected his wife, even during those rare intervals when he wasn’t doing time.

“Course most a those guys in prison is black. I, uh, you think…I mean, I always meant to ask you if it was true what they say about black guys having…I mean, the reason I ask is just…”

Athena didn’t know where to look. Resembling nothing so much as a transistor radio, the scanner lay on the table in front of her. Idly, she adjusted a control, and faint grumbling sounds issued forth.

“So, what happened today?” Pam giggled, leaning forward and fairly quivering with anticipation. “Go on any calls?”

Athena glanced at her eager face, then got up and limped to the door. “Out, Dooley.” She held the door open. “Go on out.” The shaggy brute of a dog rolled its head in her direction and exhaled heavily. Athena advanced purposefully, raising one foot as though to kick, and with vast reluctance, the dog struggled, yawning, to its feet, shook itself, then shambled with infinite slowness out the door and across the dark porch. She slammed the door.

“So what happened? Was it bloody?”

Tight-lipped with annoyance, Athena briefly sketched the events of the day, while Pam visibly savored every word. Finally, she described the last call and the woman who’d been so difficult. Ordinarily, she found Pamela’s company barely tolerable, but to night the alternative seemed worse.

“Them damn pineys,” Pam interrupted. “They just don’t know when they’re well-off.” Pamela had once worked a civilian munitions job at Fort Dix, and in her own eyes this forever exempted her from piney status. Weak static crackled from the scanner. “Wasn’t there no other calls today?”

She almost snapped but caught herself. “Actually…I don’t know how much longer I can afford to work on the rig.”

“What? You’re kidding!”

“The money’s almost gone.” Athena shrugged. The money—the few thousands that Granny Lee had left her. Every penny of Wallace’s had gone into the house before he died. “I can’t even pay you much longer. Not that I’ve even been very good about that.”

“I keep telling you, you don’t have to pay me.”

She stirred her coffee again. “I used to be so sure of myself.” She laughed. “God, I’ve made such a mess of things.”

Puzzlement spread over Pam’s face. “So, what are you gonna do? Get on welfare?”

“Like every other piney?” Grimly—as though it were the most important thing in the world—Athena examined her chewed and broken fingernails. “I hear there’s going to be an opening at the state hospital.”

Pam gasped. “But Matty’s…!”

“A job opening,” she explained hastily as she turned her gaze to the horrible coffee and mused on a future of spoon feedings and bedpans.

“Harrisville? But you can’t even stand to be around one….” Pamela blinked and set her cup down. “That’d be a real shame,” she continued carefully. “I mean, if you had to quit the ambulance and all. I know how much you like it.”

Athena waved a fly away from the sugar.

“Uh, you know, ’Thena, about welfare,” she explained with an audible gush of sympathy. “You could probably get some. I mean, since you got Matty and all.”

The other woman glanced up and then averted her eyes again.

Pam searched her face. Panicked by the conjunction of subjects—the boy and the asylum—she cast her eyes about wildly. The Ouija board had been pushed to one side of the table, and she pounced on it with desperate enthusiasm. “You want to play? You should of seen all the fun me and Matty had to night. Chabwok just wouldn’t shut up for some reason. You should of seen all the stuff he was saying. ‘Danger’ and ‘death’ and stuff.” She slid the board between them. “You want to play?” Pointed stars and moons with faces decorated the chipped and peeling board. An empty water glass rested upside down over the letters. “Come on,” she coaxed. “We can ask it about the ambulance!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on, I bet it says you’re gonna get money from some-wheres.”

“My grandmother had one of these.” She rested her hand lightly on the board. “She was so religious. Did I ever tell you? Something of an amateur spiritualist. All the neighbors and church folk always used to come in for advice.”

“Yeah? Like old Mother Jenks?”

“They used to try to give her money.” Athena’s voice stayed low and soft. “She’d never take it. ‘It’s a gift.’ That’s what she’d say. A gift.”

“You went to live with her after your mom died?”

“Did you hear something outside?”

“Prob’ly just the dog.”

“Shall we make the trip to mount Holly this week?” Changing the subject, Athena cleared her throat. “We must be out of nearly everything. I know we need sugar.”

“Yeah, all we really got is cans a soup. Remember, ’Thena, I bought all that stuff, and then I forgot and bought more?”

The red light on the scanner wavered, and Athena went absolutely still.

Pam could just make out what sounded like garbled numbers in the static. “What…?”

“Police dispatcher, out by Atsion.” She listened. “That’s an accident.”

“Will you have to go?”

She shushed her. “At this hour, usually they’ll call Burlington County.” For another moment, she strained to hear voices. “My mother’s not dead. She’s in a…a sort of a home.”

Outside was blackness, and the crickets raged. The two women sat in the grimy kitchen and listened to the scanner and planned a trip to a distant supermarket, the Ouija board untouched between them. “You hungry?” Pamela scrounged stale cookies out of a canister.

Small wonder they w ere running low, Athena reflected—her sister-in-law ate everything in sight. Setting down the pencil stub, she twisted dials on the scanner, trying to recapture fading words. Finally giving up with a sigh, she continued writing up a shopping list on a bit of brown paper.

“…an’ as long as we’re gonna be in Mount Holly, I’ll be needing some more bug spray, because them damn bees are eating up my flowers again. I swear, you can just sit there an see them going right after my flowers.”

Athena almost choked on her coffee.

“Oh, an’ I used your last light bulb. Didn’t you notice how nice an bright it is in here?” She waited for a response, but Athena had stopped paying attention again. “I guess it must be getting late.” Noisily draining the last of the liquid, Pam plunked her cup down on the tablecloth and stood up. “I guess I better be—”

“I’ll walk out with you. I want to get rid of this garbage before the ants find it.”

“Can’t that wait till morning, ’Thena? I know you don’t want to go out there.”

Ignoring her, Athena maneuvered around the crowded kitchen and scraped plates into a leaking bag.

“Here, why don’t you let me help you with that?” But she just leaned against the cellar door and watched.

“You want to get the back door, Pamela? Don’t forget your board.”

“I’m gonna leave it here. We’re supposed to play again tomorrow.” She held the door open while Athena carried the garbage onto the porch. “Oh, I meant to carry up that…” Pam hesitated. “You know that bag of clothes down the cellar? Matty needs…never mind, I’ll get them tomorrow.”

“I’ll do it,” said Athena. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust. The open doorway lit the porch floor; it seemed to silence the crickets. “No.” The light began to swing away. “Leave the door open.”

“But, ’Thena, the mosquitoes…”

“Leave it.” The night sounded like a rustling curtain. Holding the bag away from herself, she moved down the porch steps as a brown form emerged from the yard.

“Why don’t you just give that to me to dump?” Pamela trudged along behind her. “You go back to the house.”

Athena kept walking, her shadow, framed in the kitchen light, spreading across the yard, while the dog frisked around, sniffing at the garbage.

“Well then,” suggested Pam, “why don’t you just dump it here for now and…Oh well. Sure is dark to night. Get outta my way, Dooley.” Reluctantly, she took the path that led around to the front of the house. “Well then, see ya tomorrow then, I guess. You walkin’ me home, dog?”

Athena stopped walking. “Do you want the flashlight?” she called. “It’s in the car.”

“I can see. G’night. I’m takin’ Dooley.”

“Are you sure?”

A faint voice drifted back through the darkness. “I sure hope them wild dogs ain’t nowheres round here!”

“Pamela?”

An insect trilled.

Beginning to sweat, Athena forced one foot in front of the other, quickly passing beyond the farthest perimeter of light, her footsteps making almost no noise in the sand and clumped weeds. She skirted the unused shed as a skittering sound issued from within its indefinite shape. Maybe rats, she thought. The weeds grew higher this far from the house, and they rustled dryly as she moved through them. Behind the shed, well beyond the yard, the trash heap was a formless hump, and to night the smell seemed especially bad. It would have to be burned soon. Trusting her nose for sense of direction, she chucked the garbage, and a tin can rattled.

Pines circled everywhere, beyond the mound, around the shed.

Another cricket called to the first now, softer, subdued, fading.
I’m an intelligent adult.
Then a third began.
It’s irrational to be afraid of the dark.
Heading back toward the porch, she tripped over something invisible, almost falling.
I will not run.
The yellowish light of the doorway seemed faraway.
Never make it.
The dark began a hollow roaring in her ears; like a swimmer swept out to sea, she foundered, the lighted doorway providing her only lifeline.

As she climbed the porch steps, she could feel the darkness sucking at her.
Heartbeat a little faster.
She slammed the door and leaned against it.
Respiration a bit more rapid
—
that’s all.
All around her, the house lay still.

Alone.
Clearing the coffee cups, she stacked them with the rest of the week’s dirty dishes.
Alone in the house.
She picked up the scanner. All the downstairs lights were on, yet shadowed corners filled the rooms.
Except for Matthew, of course.
Her hand hesitated before switching off the kitchen light. Quietly, almost stealthily, she checked the living-room windows. Most were boarded, but through one intact pane the strumming night showed solid: iron nothingness. She tried to cover it by pulling and poking the skimpy curtains closed, but it was as though the window glass had been coated with black paint that seeped through the fabric.

At the center of the room, an armchair stood on scrolled claw feet, and she perched on one of the massive arms. She’d always liked this chair. The frayed material, scratchy with the ghost of a raised pattern, had long ago faded to some indeterminate and dusty shade of gray. It was ugly, really, but so solid, so protective.

She wound the rubber band out of her hair, smoothing back the dark curls with one hand, holding the scanner lightly in the other. She knew she should go to bed now. The armchair faced a tight, grimy fireplace, and blackness lay in the cracks of the floor. Dimness around the lamp transformed the room into something smaller, more personal. She crossed her arms in front of her breasts, hugged herself, breathing against the pressure, then letting go, allowing her arms to fall away and fade in her lap. She thought about bed again, but it seemed an impossible distance. She’d have to climb the stairs to her airless room, all that way. So far. Crickets sounded dimly through the walls, an empty nighttime noise, like the voice of faucets leaking at the edge of her awareness.

Darkness pressed the house.

Pamela picked her way across the bridge.
Just my luck to fall in some night.
She grinned to herself.
They’ll hear me yelling from here to Leeds Point.
One of the planks was missing, and she could smell the brown water below.

Far ahead, she heard Dooley bark, the sound deep in his barrel chest.
Chasing a possum or something.
The dog often escorted her home, always ranging far into the night around her. She stepped up the pace. Her trailer lay just down the road toward town, making her Athena’s nearest neighbor.

She heard loud breathing and the soft sound of running, then Dooley charged past her. “Good dog.” Panting, the dog padded around, licking at her. “Yuck.” She petted his head, wiping her hand on his fur. “Good boy now.” He trotted alongside a moment, then launched off into the darkness again.

That pig.
Following, Pam frowned.
That piney bitch.
Her mother also lived along this road.
Always flauntin’ all them men in my face, even when I was little.

As she walked on, the memory of one afternoon in Athena’s kitchen came to her. She’d been boasting about how important her job at the army base had been. Becoming excited, she’d babbled about her “double life,” dropping exaggerated hints about the night she’d managed to get herself used by a group of drunken GIs. Maybe she’d been trying to shock Athena, or perhaps she’d wanted some sympathetic response. What ever she’d been looking for, she hadn’t found it: Athena’s face had twisted with disgust.
I don’t see what she got so high and mighty about anyhow. It ain’t like everybody don’t know about her and that cop.
Immediately, she felt ashamed.
I shouldn’t think that way about ’Thena. Why she’s…she’s the most…